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No Booker Prize winners make the cut, while only three titles from the BBC's 2003 Big Read poll of the nation's 100 favourite books are represented.

But the self-help book The Road Less Travelled by American psychiatrist M Scott Peck is included, as is James Redfield's New Age tome, The Celestine Prophecy - which the author originally published himself.

Perhaps more predictably, JRR Tolkien comes a respectable third with The Hobbit while Delia Smith makes an appearance at number four for her Complete Cookery Course.

Fantasy author Terry Pratchett, who recently revealed he has early onset Alzheimer's disease, makes the list three times for novels from his Discworld series.

These books have what is termed in retail a 'long tail' - they sell for a long time after the initial peak. It has led Nielsen to nickname them the "evergreens".

Tom Tivnan, features editor of The Bookseller magazine, said none of his colleagues had guessed any of the titles on the list.

Most thought Harper Lee's To Kill a Mockingbird and Jane Austen's Pride and Prejudice would feature, he said.

He commented: "A lot of these books are quite niche, for example The Celestine Prophecy.

"But maybe that's the secret - many are books of which people say, 'Have you heard about this?' "

In total volumes they still do not compare with the best selling books of the last decade.

That list is dominated by Dan Brown and Harry Potter author JK Rowling, who have entered the market more recently.

Brown's thriller The Da Vinci Code, which tops the absolute bestseller list according to Nielsen BookScan, has sold almost 4.5 million copies. Birdsong has sold just under a million.

But Mr Tivnan commented: "These are books that maybe are not going to be centre stage in your bookshop, but you really need to have them on the shelf. They are nice little earners."

Mr Tivnan said the evergreen list was retrospective, in that entries must have been published by 1998.

The Bookseller has compiled a "next generation" list which foresees the evergreens of the future.

It predicts a "far less eclectic" mix with Brown and Rowling set to dominate, said Mr Tivnan.

Andre Breedt, research and development analyst at Nielsen BookScan, said the evergreen list gave a guide to booksellers in a vast market in which 200,000 unique titles are sold every week.

He said: "People usually only look at the bestseller lists. The evergreen list is a way of showing that some unusual books do incredibly well over time."

Publishing phenomena - like the Harry Potter books and Khaled Hosseini's The Kite Runner - often bumped along as consistent but unremarkable sellers for years before sales erupted, he added.

"With all the marketing material in the world you can only really make a book sell over the short term," he said.

What really drives book sales over longer periods is "word of mouth".

Some believe the list is distorted in that it measures the sales of particular ISBN numbers, rather than titles.

Consequently they say classics like Jane Austen's Pride and Prejudice, which was published under 62 different editions in 2007, do not make the list when they should.